A chord, stronger or weaker, is snapped asunder in every parting, and time’s busy fingers are not practiced in re-splicing broken ties. Meet again you may; will it be in the same way? With the same sympathies? With the same sentiments? Will the souls, hurrying on in diverse paths, unite once more, as if the interval had been a dream? Rarely, rarely!

Bulwer-Lytton frames parting as a physical rupture: each farewell snaps a “chord” of connection, and time—personified as industrious but unskilled—cannot truly mend what separation breaks. The passage questions the common hope that reunions restore relationships unchanged, pressing a series of rhetorical questions that expose how experiences and diverging life-paths alter sympathies and sentiments. The emphatic “Rarely, rarely!” underscores a Victorian preoccupation with the fragility of intimacy amid mobility, ambition, and social change. The quote’s force lies in its insistence that continuity in human bonds is not automatic; it must be actively renewed, and even then may return in a different key.